The men on the lifeboat, now with hands numbed by cold, rowed with extra vigor toward the Carpathia, which had picked up Titanic’s distress signals and had traveled 58 miles in an effort to rescue its survivors. “And then we were able to discern the hull of a steamship heading in our direction.” Had the wireless operators managed to send out a distress signal and call for the help of any nearby ships? The possibility that they could drift for miles in the middle of the harsh Atlantic for days on end was suddenly very real.Īs dawn broke on April 15, the passengers in Lifeboat 7 saw a row of lights and a dark cloud of smoke in the distance.“Warming ourselves as best we could in the cramped quarters of the lifeboat, we watched that streak of black smoke grow larger and larger,” recalled Dorothy. “There was nothing to say and nothing we could do.” Faced with the bitter cold and increasingly choppy seas, Dorothy had to acknowledge the possibility that she might not last the night. After a brief stopover in Paris, she would sail back to New York from Cherbourg on April 10. Although she had been away for only three weeks, she had benefited from the change of scene-she said she felt “like a new woman”-and cabled back to tell the studio of her plans.
STEEL OCEAN GAME SHIP LINEUP SERIES
An emergency had arisen at the studio she was needed to start work at once on a series of films. However, when they arrived in Genoa from Venice on April 8, they received a telegram at their hotel requesting that Dorothy return to America. It seemed the ideal solution.” (Her married 42-year-old lover, Éclair’s Jules Brulatour, was one of the most powerful producers in the film industry.)ĭorothy and her mother sailed for Europe on March 17, 1912, with an itinerary that was to include not only the capitals of the Continent, but also Algiers and Egypt. Brulatour made arrangements for me to have a wondrous holiday abroad.
“I was feeling very run down and everyone insisted I go away for a while,” she recalled later.
STEEL OCEAN GAME SHIP LINEUP MOVIE
The days were long, and she realized that, in effect, there was “very little of the glamour connected with movie stars.” She may have been earning $175 a week-the equivalent of nearly $4,000 today-but she was exhausted she even went so far as to consider quitting the studio. “No one can describe the frightful sounds,” she remembered later.īefore stepping onto the Titanic, Dorothy Gibson had already transformed herself from an ordinary New Jersey girl into a model for the famous illustrator Harrison Fisher-whose lush images of idealized American beauty graced the covers of popular magazines-and then into a star of the silent screen.īy the spring of 1912, Dorothy was feeling so overworked that she pleaded with her employers at the Éclair studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, to grant her a holiday. This was counterpointed by a deeper sound emanating from under the water, the noise of explosions that she likened to the terrific power of Niagara Falls. “Then the awful thing happened, the thing that will remain in my memory until the day I die.”ĭorothy listened as 1,500 people cried out to be saved, a noise she described as a horrific mixture of yells, shrieks and moans.
“Suddenly there was a wild coming together of voices from the ship and we noticed an unusual commotion among the people about the railing,” she said. Dorothy could not take her eyes off the ship, its bow now underwater, its stern rising up into the sky. The risk of being sucked down was high, he thought, and so the passengers and crew manning the oars rowed as hard as they could across the pitch-black sea. Realizing that the ship’s sinking was imminent, lookout George Hogg ordered that Lifeboat 7 be rowed away from the Titanic. Dorothy and her mother, Pauline, who had been traveling with her, had watched as lifeboat after lifeboat left the vessel, but by just after 2 o’clock it was obvious that the vast majority of its passengers would not be able to escape from the liner. She was beginning to shiver.Įver since it had been launched, at 12:45 a.m., Lifeboat 7 had remained stationed only 20 yards away from the Titanic in case it could be used in a rescue operation.
©2010 RMS Titanic, Inc., a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions, Inc.ĭorothy Gibson-the 22-year-old silent film star- huddled in a lifeboat, dressed in only a short coat and sweater over an evening gown. The RMS Titanic departed from Southampton, England on its maiden voyage to New York City on April 10, 1912.
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